Gallery Vassie is proud to announce Perihelion, a retrospective exhibition of the photographs of prominent British Photographer Jason Oddy, showing examples from a number of his monumental series.

At the heart of Oddy’s work lies the question, how different types of architecture might imply or produce different types of people. His work in institutions such as the Pentagon or Neue Prora, a former Nazi holiday resort, suggests that we undergo a subjectification through architecture, latterly he has explored how, rather than regulating or directing us, the built environment might engage us in other ways.
Concrete Spring, is an in-depth study of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s legacy in Algeria: two university campuses and an Olympic sports hall built shortly after Algerian independence.

With startling angles and sweeping curves, these modernist masterpieces push concrete to its sculptural, even poetic limits. They radiate the democratic, humanist values Niemeyer originally imbued them with. Oddy embarked on this series in the wake of the Arab Spring. At that critical juncture in the region his principal goal was to produce work that would both identify and reanimate the emancipatory ambitions that have lain dormant in Niemeyer’s Algerian projects for decades. If it is the case that just as we inhabit architecture it also inhabits us, then in Concrete Spring Oddy has sought places which point to the possibility of moving beyond our traditional, hierarchical relationship to manmade space. It is a body of work that intimates how architecture might give power to people rather than institutions and, in so doing, might yet succeed in setting it’s inhabitants free.